This comes from some recent conversations I’ve had with musicians. The notion of “who owns this?” for bands and chamber groups can be complex. Even with a well-worked-out band agreement it can be complicated. When a music group is young, lots of people support the band from lending a couch to crash on to running the merch table to contributing money and in-kind goods and services. The fans contribute to the band by telling their friends and by … well, being fans. In both the classical world and the pop/rock/etc world, managers invest time on the hope there will be revenues in the future. Read more »

“Prima Donna” (Italian for Leading lady) and Diva are terms originally used to describe the temperamental and demanding tendencies of Opera stars, the rock stars of the 18th through the early 20th centuries. The music may have changed but these demanding tendencies flourish in every medium and genre.

In my practice, I spend a lot of time with my musician clients discussing the problems of working with Prima Donnas — as well as trying to moderate their own career-killing Prima Donna tendencies Read more »

The only thing worse than a blog that goes quiet is a sheepish post by the author while coming back to the blog. So I’ll spare you. I’ve been having some good experiences with my psychology-of-music-groups project, but the good parts have been explicitly or implicitly under a promise of confidentiality. so I have some good tales to tell that I can’t tell.

This, along with being absurdly busy, is pretty much why I haven’t said anything in this space for a long time. I have been thinking a lot about clever ways I can speak in public about what I have been learning, but it’s not easy. Read more »